Agustín Pániker

Indika

Original title:

Índika. Una descolonización intelectual

About the book:

Indika

An intellectual decolonisation

Is India a subcontinent? What is the East? And is there one civilisation? Was there an Aryan invasion of India? Were the untouchables or the Tribal groups the original inhabitants of India. What are the races? And history? What does it mean to be converted to Islam. How did the idea of Pakistan arise? Where did the confrontation between Hindus and Moslems come from? And the timeless caste system? Has colonisation obliterated the traditional Indian medicine, cosmology or jurisprudence? What is Hinduism? What is religion, in reality? These are some of the questions that Agustin Paniker, an expert in things Indian, addresses in this fascinating book with outstanding readability and rigour.
Indika sets out to be a sketch of the decolonisation of the cliches, stereotypes and stories that people our understanding of the Indian world. In the background the genealogy of how certain views of the West and certain views of Modernity came to impose themselves aggressively over other ways of seeing, being and understanding the world.

Anchored in post-colonial and pluralist ways of seeing the world, Paniker however goes beyond deconstruction to show us how in the complex colonial relations of the West and India were moulded mutually, and how Indians relocated and hybridised the narratives, categories and developments of Modernity. 

The result is a fascinating inquiry into the history, society, geography, religion, science or politics of South India. An anthropology that is unique of its kind, it aims to bring out into the open the prejudices that cloud  intercultural understanding. But Indika is a work that transcends the limits of Asiatic studies and seriously questions the procedures of human sciences as well as bringing out the darker side of Modernity. A work, in short, for any readers that are prepared to widen their horizons.

About the author:

Agustín Pániker is a publisher and writer. He is the author of El jainismo: historia, sociedad, filosofía y práctica (Jainism: History, society, philosophy and practice) and Los sikhs (The Sikhs).